Is This Your First War? (7 page)

“Brother,” I said to him in broken Russian. “Lagman?”

He nodded. I ordered a bowl. For some reason the familiar dish made me deliriously happy. I called Janyce on the satellite phone and left a rambling message on her answering machine.

The day went downhill after that. I did manage to find a student who spoke good English and was happy to work for the day as a translator. But trying to probe below the surface to find out what people really thought proved to be near impossible. Uzbekistan was a police state and politics was a potentially dangerous topic of discussion. “They're afraid to say anything critical,” my translator told me after our sixth or seventh interview with someone who said only that she wanted peace and trusted her president. I went back to my hotel and dictated a cliché-ridden story to the desk back in Ottawa. I thought I could save the
Citizen
some money by using the hotel phone rather than my satellite one, but the hotel manager charged me $100. I wasn't yet in Afghanistan, and already I was worrying about running out of cash. I lay on my bed and waited for the cab driver to come back and take me to the border in the morning.

He arrived at dawn as I stood outside the hotel's front doors. The light was grey. A man was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with shovels along the sidewalk. He looked far too old and thin to lift it. He padded by quickly in his flip-flop sandals.

“Okay?” the driver asked.

I threw my bag into the trunk. “Okay. Let's go.”

We left the city before any traffic appeared on the roads. Soon Tashkent disappeared behind us. The sun rose above the horizon. On either side of the highway stretched ocean-flat cotton fields, another leftover of Stalin's forced collectivization. When we reached the border with Tajikistan, an embarrassed-looking teenaged soldier with an AK-47 demanded a five-dollar bribe.

“What are you doing in Khujand?”

The man who approached me in the small airport in Tajikistan's northernmost major city was thin with high cheekbones and a thick toothbrush moustache. He wore a fake leather jacket and held a smouldering stub of a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, which he neither brought to his lips nor discarded. I was pacing back and forth in front of my backpack, which I had tossed on the floor, periodically stopping to stare at the departure schedule. No flights were leaving for Dushanbe until late that evening.

At the time, I was obsessed with filing stories back to Ottawa as frequently as possible. I had convinced myself that if a day went by in which I didn't send the newspaper a story, Scott might decide the gamble of sending me to Central Asia had failed and I'd be called back home to account for ruining his reputation. Waiting for eight hours in a smoky airport meant a wasted day and a newspaper edition without my byline in it.

“What are you doing here?” the man asked again.

“It's a long story,” I said. “I'm trying to leave. Afghanistan. Well, Dushanbe first.”

“Wait here.”

I knew the man was a cab driver, or at least knew people with access to cars. And sure enough he returned with news that a friend of his, Bachrom, was willing to drive me to Dushanbe. I looked at the very basic map in my Lonely Planet and calculated that Dushanbe was two or three hundred kilometres away. The cartographer had drawn some rough mountains between Khujand and Dushanbe, but I didn't pay them much notice. Four, maybe five hours, I thought. I'll be there by mid-afternoon. Lots of time to work. We negotiated a price.

“Okay,” I said. “Let's go.”

A few hours later, crammed into the back seat of a tiny hatchback, I stuck my head out the window and stared up at the jagged peaks of the Fan Mountains that towered above us in all directions. They'd make your stomach turn if you looked too long. On our right, a few feet of broken rock extended beyond the edge of the paved road, and then a drop into nothingness. We rounded a corner and faced a truck coming from the opposite direction. It seemed to occupy the entire road and showed little sign of stopping or slowing down. Bachrom downshifted and guided the car closer to the edge of the road. The truck driver blared his horn. I closed my eyes.

“Mikhail, a little beer?”

Ali, a round-faced man with thin, straight hair and a friendly manner, was squeezed beside me in the backseat. He held up a bottle and smiled. His eyes were clear. After several hours on the road, this was the first bottle he had opened. As soon as we started climbing switchbacks into the Fan Mountains, it became clear that the trip to Dushanbe would be an all-day affair. Fortunately, Bachrom, Ali, and Azirov, another passenger, were good company. Ali in particular befriended me immediately. He had been trained as a medical doctor during Soviet times, but Tajikistan's civil war and its corrupt and dictatorial government meant that he sometimes earned less than five dollars a month. He decided it wouldn't be right for a foreigner to visit Tajikistan without drinking fermented mare's milk and insisted that Bachrom detour to find some.

“Is it alcoholic?” I asked.

“A little bit of alcohol,” said Ali. He smiled and rubbed his stomach. Bachrom hissed a whistling stream of air between his teeth and cursed. There were soldiers on the road ahead. They flagged us down. Bachrom wordlessly handed the soldier a small bribe and was waved on. “You will see that money solves everything in this country,” said Ali.

By now it was getting late in the afternoon. Shepherds were bringing their flocks into the valleys. Some sold honey by the side of the road. Others set up camp and boiled tea over open fires. An old man on a horse picked his way down a mountain path and rode across the road ahead of us. He wore robes and an ancient long-barrelled rifle strapped to his back. A massive shaggy grey dog trotted beside him, lifting its muzzle often to look at his master on the horse. The man stared straight ahead and didn't quicken his pace to clear the road as Bachrom stopped to wait for him to pass. He reached the other side of road and climbed back into the hills.

We stopped for dinner at a bare-bones teahouse on the side of a hill. Ali bought yoghurt, mutton, tea, and bread, which we ate with our fingers from communal bowls while sitting on rope beds covered with carpets. Around us were shepherds who could afford to pay for food. Their dogs circled beyond the reach of a thrown stone. Farther down the mountain were visible the fires of shepherds without the means to pay someone else to cook for them. Ali insisted on paying for everything.

“We want you to know that you have friends here, Misha,” he said, using an affectionate Russian diminutive of Michael. “We are your friends.”

Ali tried to smile, but his eyes were flat, and he was soon lamenting the state of his country. “We have no democracy here, no freedom. The police are always taking, taking, taking.”

I tried to guide the conversation toward the attacks in New York and the war in Afghanistan that had just begun in earnest with the start of the American bombing campaign against Taliban targets. Nobody thought the war would affect them. “The Americans will come. The Americans will go,” said Bachrom. “We'll still have our problems.”

Ali (left) and Bachrom on the road between Khujand and Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

We got back into the car as night fell. Bachrom picked up speed, braking and easing his car to the right as we approached every blind turn and then accelerating when the road opened up briefly ahead. We rounded one corner, and Bachrom slammed on the brakes. A column of expensive cars was ahead of us, driving in the same direction.

“Military command,” Ali said, while Bachrom cut his speed and coasted. “They are bad, dangerous people.”

Conversation didn't resume until after the convoy had disappeared. We rounded another corner, and our headlights picked up a roadside hut and two soldiers pacing outside, their young, smooth faces shadowed by the stiff green peaked caps above them. One waved at us to stop. Bachrom rolled down the window a couple of inches and passed out a tightly folded bill. I looked over at Ali. His face was buried in his hands.

By the summer of 2001, weeks before the September 11 attacks, the Taliban had taken over almost all of Afghanistan, driving the Northern Alliance into an ever-shrinking pocket in the north, and in the traditional resistance fighter redoubt of the Panjshir Valley. Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, was fighting another seemingly hopeless war. He was a master of guerilla tactics, but the odds against him were as long as they had ever been when facing the Soviets. The Taliban still had the firm backing of Pakistan's largest and most powerful spy agency, and their depleted ranks were continuously refilled with recruits from Pakistan's madrassahs. Their most notorious guest, Osama bin Laden, provided them with cash, international connections, and the guns, muscle, and ideological zeal of the foreign, mostly Arab, jihadists in al-Qaeda.

Massoud's allies were much more fickle. He received some support from Russia, Iran, and India. His agents cooperated closely with the CIA. But while America recognized that the United States and Massoud shared a common enemy in Osama bin Laden, there was little interest in confronting the Taliban under the presidencies of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. America wanted to narrow the scope of its terrorist problem. And one man was much easier to deal with than a movement that controlled millions of people and most of a country.

Massoud tried to change this. He sent envoys to America to meet with State Department officials to try to convince them that the Taliban should be considered part of a larger Islamist network funded by bin Laden and other wealthy Gulf sheiks. Simply getting rid of bin Laden wouldn't solve the problem. As recently as August 2001, Massoud dispatched his longtime friend and foreign minister, an ophthalmologist named Abdullah Abdullah, to Washington, where the Northern Alliance's resident lobbyist managed to book a few appointments at the State Department and on Capitol Hill. Abdullah went with Qayum Karzai, brother of Hamid Karzai, who was then a leader among anti-Taliban Pashtuns from Afghanistan's south. They got nowhere. As Steve Coll documents in
Ghost Wars
, a history of the CIA in Afghanistan prior to the September 11 attacks, “the members they met with could barely manage politeness.” Even arguments based on the oppression of women under the Taliban found little traction. Instead, the two Afghan envoys heard counter-arguments about “moderate” and “non-moderate” Taliban. They left after a week, completely dejected.

It wouldn't take long before bin Laden demonstrated how closely al-Qaeda co-operated with its Taliban hosts. On September 9, 2001, two Arab television journalists with Belgian passports arrived in the village of Khodja Bahuddin, where Massoud kept a base in northern Afghanistan. Hidden inside their camera was a bomb that they had carried with them from Pakistan, to Kabul, and finally to Massoud's compound. When it exploded in Massoud's face, he was fatally wounded and died soon afterwards. Twenty-five thousand people attended his funeral a week later, which was held, fittingly, in the Panjshir Valley.

“The murder plot had been meticulously planned by al-Qaeda,” writes Rashid in
Descent into Chaos
. “If the attack had taken place a few weeks earlier, as planned, and the Northern Alliance had been destroyed by the Taliban offensive, the Americans would have had no allies on the ground after 9/11 took place. For the first time in more than a decade, the trajectory of Afghanistan's sad, desperate history was to cross paths with a major international event, and Massoud was not alive to take advantage of it.”

The Northern Alliance was devastated by the loss of Massoud, but the Taliban offensive did not destroy them. Massoud was officially succeeded by General Mohammad Fahim. And now, finally, the Americans were joining their long war against the Taliban. When I visited Afghanistan's lacklustre embassy in Dushanbe, however, it was Massoud's face that peered from posters lining the walls. It was easy to understand why so many foreigners swooned. Massoud was very handsome. But he had refused to play the role of a globetrotting revolutionary extolling his cause on speaking tours and from university podiums. He had commanded the loyalty of so many Afghans because he didn't leave their side even during Afghanistan's darkest hours. Now the soldiers who had fought for him squatted on the curb outside the embassy while I picked up my visa inside. Their uniforms looked as though men unused to needlework had sewn badges and patches on generic green tunics. We looked each other over as I left the embassy. It wasn't the last time I would underestimate their skill as fighters.

I had been told a convoy would be leaving in a couple of days. There wasn't much to do in the meantime but wait and wander. Dushanbe was a bleak city. Most people couldn't afford to drive, and those who could drove SUVs. They were either drug runners or staff at the various NGOs and United Nations agencies clustered in a posh and gated area of a town. The international aid types drove white SUVs. The drug runners had more diverse tastes. That's how you could tell them apart. I also called the
Citizen
's office manager and insisted that the newspaper wire me more money. They agreed to a few more thousand dollars, which pushed my total back over five grand.